Open strategy and the historical framing of openness

This article reinterprets open strategy (OS) as historically framed openness, challenging its portrayal as a recent managerial innovation. Drawing on Alan Fox’s frames of reference – unitary, pluralist, and radical – we conceptualize openness as a historically variable configuration of authority, participation, disclosure, legitimacy, and power. Adopting an interpretive and conceptual-historical approach, the article reconnects contemporary OS practices with earlier institutional debates over information disclosure and workplace democracy. Through a dialogue between industrial relations theory and historical organization studies, we show how practices of transparency and inclusion rework long-standing tensions between managerial control and employee participation. By tracing continuities from twentieth-century disclosure practices to contemporary participatory initiatives, the analysis reveals how claims of openness simultaneously evoke and obscure the history of industrial democracy. The article contributes to historical organization studies by demonstrating how contemporary strategy concepts are shaped by longer institutional trajectories of participation and governance.